The World Wide Web of hypertext interlinked documents residing on networked computer servers located throughout the Internet has become a very popular mechanism for distributing information of various types among a wide audience at low cost. Selling advertising space on the Web has become a dominant way of covering the costs associated with presenting certain information. For example, content providers, such as Cable News Network (CNN) and U.S.A. Today, now provide highly detailed and sophisticated information at their Web sites for free. These sites are typically supported, at least in part, by the advertising they display.
Information is typically viewed on the Web using a browser program running on a client computer. A browser can read Web pages, built using Hyper Text Markup Language (“HTML”), downloaded from a Web server and display the contents. HTML provides the capability to display text, graphics, hypertext links, interactive applets and streaming audio/video. A Web browser can also read and write “cookies”. Cookies are blocks of data that a Web server may store on a client computer and later retrieve to obtain information from the client computer. Most current generation Web browsers also run small segments of computer code which are transported over the Internet and executed on the client machine. They are typically written as Java™ applets and are run when referenced from a Web page.
Advertisers now increasingly seek ways to entice Web users who are casually browsing by grabbing their attention or perhaps even ultimately engaging them in an electronic commerce transaction, without actually requiring them to perform other processes which are perceived as being cumbersome. For example, it is now quite common for most Web pages to contain “banner ads” that contain attention-grabbing multimedia effects. Such effects are typically enabled by applet programs that not only present elaborate images, but also present animated objects and sounds.